Blind geek, fanfiction lover (Harry Potter and MLP). Mastodon at: @fastfinge@equestria.social.
Surprised nobody has mentioned my two favourites:
Most of the other stuff I listen to is either industry specific or fandom/hobby specific.
Man, I’m getting flashbacks to my days running omenserve on undernet. I had no idea people were still doing this! How does the content compare to places like Anna’s archive these days?
NVDA. Without it I literally couldn't use my computer every day, or do my job.
That was me, and my bad. As a blind person myself, I’ve never tried to post an image. I knew including alt text was possible, but I didn’t realize the method was undocumented, and Lemmy doesn’t prompt for it. If I had, I would have offered help, not just snark.
Though it's causing folks to look at other alternatives, and realize it would be a good idea to have one. So even if communities don't end up moving, Reddit's power is reduced slightly, just because other places do exist.
You posted an image without alt-text in a thread about blind folks? Really?
It really depends on your use case. If you want something that sounds pretty okay, and is decently fast, Piper fits the bill. However, this is just a command line TTS system; you'll need to build all the supporting infrastructure if you want it to read audiobooks. https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
An extension for the free and open source NVDA screen reader to use piper lives here: https://github.com/mush42/piper-nvda
If you want something that can run in realtime, though sounds somewhat robotic, you want dectalk. This repo comes with libraries and dlls, as well as several sample applications. Note, however, that the licensing status of this code is...uh...dubious to say the least. Dectalk was abandonware for years, and the developer leaked the sourcecode on a mailing list in the 2000's. However, ownership of the code was recently re-established, and Dectalk is now a commercial product once again. But the new owners haven't come after the repo yet: https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk
If you want a robotic but realtime voice that's fully FOSS with known licensing status, you want espeak-ng: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng
If you want a fully fledged software application to read things to you, but don't need a screen reader and don't want to build scripts yourself, you want bookworm: https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm
Note, however, that you should build bookworm from source. While the author accepts pull requests, because of his circumstances, he's no longer able to build new releases: https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm/discussions/224
If you are okay with using closed-source freeware, Balabolka is another way to go to get a full text to speech reader: https://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm
Ah, good to know. Back in my day, when we had to walk a hundred miles to school in the snow, up hill both ways, IRC was the only place to get ebooks. I'm guessing it's just the old users clinging on now.
Don't depend on this one, yet. The instance is still crashing every six hours or so for reasons I don't understand and can't make headway on.
Getting a decent VPS is pretty cheap. Email is the enormous problem. Even if your VPS provider allows outgoing email, your IP address will be flagged and blocked by all mailservers everywhere for the crime of not being Google or Microsoft, or not having a full-time person working 24/7 to satisfy the people in charge of blacklists. You can pay someone else to send your email, but that's going to cost you as much or more as the VPS you're using to host your entire app.
In my opinion, folks should avoid Cloudflare at all costs. They're free speech maximalists with a history of defending NAZI's and other terrible people. They only discontinue service to white nationalists when the media attention gets too hot. Then they turn around and let them back in once things have died down.
Also, speaking as a screen reader user, if they think your IP address is suspicious (maybe because you're using Tor or a VPN), they present an inaccessible captcha and don't offer work-arounds. Then because the entire website is blocked behind the captcha, screen reader users can't even get in contact with you to let you know what's happening.
So we at rblind.com blocked lemmygrad pretty much right away, for the reasons stated above. But I'm starting to wonder if the future of Lemmy instances might not be organized around topics. I'm not sure that, if Lemmy takes off, moderating a "general interest" style instance is sustainable. I'm also not sure everyone centralizing onto one or two general instances is a good idea. Once we get out of alpha, the intent is for us to be an instance focused on posts and topics of interest to the blind community. We disabled community creation for that reason; I don't want someone signing up with us and creating the FunnyAnimalPictures community,, because as a blind person, I just don't want to be their admin, not because that content is bad in any way. Parcially sighted folks who want that content can federate with whatever instance has it, and I can trust those people to moderate and admin that community. Federation seems to be as useful for better distributing administration and moderation workloads as anything else. My real worry is that beehaw is too general and open. From the description, I don't really understand what it's for, or who should be there. At least I know the purpose of lemmygrad, and what kind of people I might find on it, making the "block" decision super easy.
Who's got poop.social? Feels like it needs to be running a Lemmy.
You can't. Our instance is deeply unstable at the moment. We're working on it.
Communication with anyone outside of Lemmy is, of course, impossible.
I really don't love this. Couldn't we extend the mastodon blocklist to cover Lemmy somehow? I don't like automated blocking. I'd much rather find a list of trusted admins, and defederate with whatever 60 percent of them defederate with.
So who are they sending our product browsing data to in order to provide this service? At least I know what Microsoft and Google are doing with my data (nothing good). But Pocket and cloudflare and there VPN provider and whatever other random companies Firefox partners with? Who knows! How do I opt out? Who knows! How secure are these companies? Who knows! At least using Edge or Chrome I only have to hand over my data to one evil corporation, instead of several. Plus I actually get things I want in return (for me: automatic image descriptions, reader mode, read aloud, and AI based page summaries). Nothing I get from the companies Firefox works with are things I even want.
We need more topical instances. Nobody found PHPBB's confusing. Let people sign up for an account on the blindness instance, and the cooking instance, and the gaming instance. Eventually they'll discover that they can use one account for everything, and it's just easier to do it that way. But in the meantime they're not confused. We're probably going to market rblind.com that way; a spot for blind folks to network. Eventually they'll discover the federated communities on there own, without us pushing it on them.
Can someone transcribe this for those of us using screen readers? As a server in Canada, We're also worried about the hosting risk of the piracy community and considering blocking it. I'd love to read the LW statement.
How is PHP doing these days? It used to be hugely popular, but seems to have fallen into disregard in a lot of circles. I wonder if PHP being seen as a "easier" language than rust will attract more kbin developers?
Nope. This is a huge accessibility fail. Any instance that has captcha enabled is locking out anyone even slightly low vision. Everyone should be manually approving all applications. It keeps instances small, and ensures that the fediverse remains distributed. Once we start having a spam problem, we should all just be defederating every instance that offers open registration; make a script to scan for it, and update the blocklist. Nobody should be running that way. If you are, not only are you allowing spam, you're also probably allowing humans who are engaged in ban evasion and other bad things. All posts and comments that come from your instance are in some small part your responsibility. Be at least vaguely aware of who your users are. If you ban one, and you run open registration, how do you intend to make sure they're not the user you just banned, signing up with another email address? We're not big tech, so we don't have the kinds of tools (IP reputation lists, lists of VPN IP addresses, etc) to fight ban evasion in any kind of automated way.
Depending on what music you're listening to and how loudly, the leaking from your headphones might be louder than the sound of your feet.
So do I!
I also think it is the greater good to let AIs train for free.
I'm not entirely sure about this. Freely available AI's, sure, maybe. But corporate closed source AI's that charge per token? I'm not saying no, but I'd love to hear someone justify the thinking behind why this is "the greater good".
Apparently! I don’t hide my data in any way, and constantly get ads in languages I don’t speak. Usually French, but sometimes Hindi or Chinese. And as a blind person myself, I’m not sure that my well paid full time job working in large enterprise and big tech accessibility is altruism deserving of thanks haha.
The thing I'm finding is that when I search for something where the fediverse has an answer, Google gives me the exact same answer like 20 different times on different instances. I wish Google would just list the original.
A couple reasons, I think:
AI dubbing: this makes it way easier for YouTube to add secondary dubbed tracks to videos in multiple languages. Based on the Google push to add AI into everything, including creating AI related OKR's, that's probably a primary driver. Multiple audio tracks is just needed infrastructure to add AI dubbing.
Audio description: Google is fighting enough antitrust related legal battles right now. The fact that YouTube doesn't support audio description for those of us who are blind has been an issue for a long time, and now that basically every other video streaming service supports it, I suspect they're starting to feel increased pressure to get on board. Once again, multiple audio tracks is needed infrastructure for offering audio description.
From a Mashable article published at the time, quoting the CEO in his own words:
In an interview, Prince expressed doubt about his decision to remove The Daily Stormer from Cloudflare, and conveyed concern over companies like his own, and their ability to pull a lever, and knock a website offline.
So what happens to instances who don't want to participate in a centralized allowlisting project? This is an allow list system, so eventually we just get cut out of federation? I'm still wishing for a centralized deny list, that would keep track of instances blocked by other instances, and block someone once maybe 3 other instances I trust do. That way we can still allow by default, rather than requiring that any admin who wants to set up a new system is required to know another admin who will endorse them. Frankly, I don't have a personal relationship with even a single other fediverse admin; I wouldn't want to endorse them, because I just don't know them, and I'm quite sure they also wouldn't endorse me. But saying "I trust you to block bad instances most of the time" seems way easier than "I trust you to vet all of your users".
Testing a lemmy instance to see how it might work for the r/blind community. There will be a bunch of accessibility issues fixed in the next release it looks like, so it's a bit early to judge. Also, it's pulled me, personally, into the world of being a sysadmin for other people. Now I get to figure out why email doesn't work and why when you search for a community you need to press search nine times before anything shows and all kinds of other niggles like that before I feel ready to open an instance to the general masses.
That's what worries me. When companies get desperate for cash, they tend to do pretty terrible things.
Thanks! Perfect. Wish I could award...Lemmy Gold? LOL
I never did that, my connection was too slow to want to take up someone's DCC slot for like a day to get an entire movie. Remember all the frustrating idiots who would share .lit files, but forget to remove the DRM from them?
Thanks! I didn't realize there was an announcement on Lemmy, or I would have searched. Unfortunately screenshots are kind of the only way to share posts on Discord, because you can't link someone to a Discord message on a server they're not a member of, so I can't blame you for a screenshot there. However, it is possible to add alt-text on images you post to Lemmy. :-)
I'm doing it because I'm a blind person, and this is my community.
I assume it’s because I live in Canada, and big American data just assumes all Canadians speak French. I regularly get French ads on English websites.
So require paid ssl certificates or something. I just can’t sign on to any system that requires me to establish personal friendships with other instance admins so I can beg them for endorsements. Begging Reddit to improve accessibility didn’t work. I have no interest in a system where my instance now needs to beg other admins for the right to federate. Even email doesn’t work this way.
Problem was that I usually only discovered the issue when I went to read the book lol
You might want to mention that these days SillyTavern tends to be up to date and have more features.
So in my understanding, Regional Internet Registries are in general not commercial entities, directly making money from the services they provide. The problem I have with Cloudflare is that it's directly making money off of the "neutrality" they say they provide. If white nationalists are paying you to protect them, that's an entirely different thing from a non-commercial organization treating objectionable people the same way they would treat anyone else.
I don’t block anything. I work in accessibility, so it’s important to me to know what the experiences are like for my fellow users with disabilities. I also don’t want to recommend sites or apps that are riddled with inaccessible ads. I’d rather not give them traffic at all. Though even though I let them track me, I still get ads in a language I don’t speak for cars I can’t drive. What’re they doing with all that data?